It Was All For My Family
by Gleam
Summary: Vernon Dursley is a good man.


_It Was All For My Family_

**Vernon Dursley is a good man.**

_

The Dursleys had not hated the boy. Not at first.

Vernon didn't claim himself as a particularly brilliant and shining paragon of human virtue; he was a businessman, and businessmen were not in the business of lying to themselves. Nevertheless, he was content in the deeds he had done. He had married a relatively plain woman for more than just her looks, named Petunia; he had met her in high school, made a sort of friendship with her.

She had been one of the girls skipped over for the prettier and more beautiful, and he hadn't thought anything of it when he had started talking to her during Virtual Enterprises, the elective he had chosen for his last year of college. She had apparently taken away more from the happenstance friendship than he had. When a pack of fraternity girls, hoodies and groupies and developing easy women, had begun to harass him for knocking them out of business in the class, Petunia had descended on them like some kind of mythical dragon. Vernon had never seen anyone so angry; so blessedly and unreservedly wrathful, and his heart had caught in his throat as she slapped the mascara-decorated face of one girl hard enough to knock her over a desk.

Petunia had raised herself into such a wrath over him. They started dating, and two years later married.

Vernon never mentioned the tiny bit of pride he had derived from marrying someone so plain. It buried itself into the dark cracks in him, the things he would never mention it. It appealed to the deeply-buried romantic in him, and added confidence to his marriage. Ironically, that confidence is what Petunia had been looking for, something she could take pride in defending. They made a good pair.

Another two years, Dudley arrived, and the Dursleys laughed and smiled together, a family. They were ordinary, and they knew it; and they took a certain kind of pride in having succeeded in the fit of the British mold. They had succeeded in life. They had what they wanted. Even little Dudley had smiled and gurgled his little baby words, waving his rattle inside the crib that Vernon had to take carpentry classes on Tuesdays to learn how to make.

Then the Boy arrived.

__

As any decent family woman would be, Petunia was horrified to find a baby abandoned on her doorstep. It was the worst nightmare of any well-meaning mother, only a step above finding those delicate bones in the dumpster when you stepped outside to take out the trash. The sign of another one abandoning the sacred banner of motherhood disheartened her to a deadly level, but there were still things that could be done for the baby.

"Vernon!" she called, frantic. "Someone's left a baby!"

Amidst her husband's sudden sputtering (he had probably accidentally let a mouthful of coffee down the wrong pipe, he had been drinking it when she left the kitchen) she hurriedly scooped up the baby and wrapped the hem of her blouse around it, trying to grant it a little warmth even as her arms circled around atop of that. The move left a decidedly indecent amount of skin exposed, but this was a _abandoned baby_. The neighbors could go to hell.

She turned and scurried inside, shutting the door behind her with a quiet click as the lock automatically closed into place.

__

Petunia grimaced, holding up a bottle for the infant and trying to smile for its sake. It wasn't the baby's fault that her sister had run off and gotten herself killed; to be brutally honest, it probably wasn't even her sister's fault, if the note that had come with the child was true. She knew enough of the _other world _to know it was a dangerous, dangerous place, and even Lily (the _prodigy_, the unhealthy side of her mind whispered. The one _everyone _wanted. The _pretty_ one) might have found something she couldn't have handled.

She snorted at the humor of that, smiling a brief and bitter smile; but there was a baby and he needed feeding. She held the bottle up again to the tiny body held slung in the crook of her arm.

"Hush, child." she cooed; but it was unnecessary, the boy never cried. He turned on his side, staring at her directly with impossibly green eyes, like some kind of emerald held up to the sun through emerald-colored glasses. It was so bright a color she could hardly believe it existed.

He latched onto the bottle, and drew milk from it, but she couldn't help but think that he only did so because she encouraged him to. In the month since they'd found him, he only ate when attended to. Even Dudley wasn't so bad.

She glanced up slightly, noticed the gash on his forehead was bleeding again, and sighed. She'd have to change it again.

It was strange that the boy would be a hemophiliac of the head. Petunia laughed at the odd strangeness of it all while she reached for the bandages, Lily's boy cradled carefully in the other.

__

The old bearded man (Dumbledore, Vernon remembered dumbly) had explained it as accidental magic. He had explained it as calmly as any doctor would discuss the changing of diapers: a natural biological process that had to be endured while the child grew to control its own system.

Whatever Dumbledore thought, there was nothing normal about a child murdering the family cat by staring at it. There hadn't been any warning to it either; they had all been in the living room, Petunia and Vernon watching television and Dudley playing with his new fire truck when it happened. A yowl had erupted, and Vernon's head whipped over to look at the cat. It had rolled onto its back and was jerking wildly, saliva flooding out of its mouth like some kind of dog just before mealtime. Vernon had never seen a cat in so undignified or uncontrolled a position, and it shook his world just a tiny bit to watch a cat (_his _cat) flail on its back and die like the fish it regularly pulled out of (_his_) aquarium.

Vernon had glanced over, wildly, at the children, saw Dudley's eyes locked onto the dying animal, and then saw Harry. That was his name: Harry. It had come on the note when he had been abandoned.

He was idly watching the cat, making some kind of twisting, warping movement with his hands, like he was straightening the kinks out of a garden hose. Every time the boy's hands snapped apart, the cat seized again.

Then his hands came abruptly apart again, upwards and downwards, and the cat's back arced as it snapped in half. It made a noise (_chhrrrrikkk)_ that Vernon was sure he would never forget through all of his life. The cat mewled weakly (it might have just been the air leaving its deflated lungs) and died.

He hadn't even named it yet. It was just Cat. Vernon felt unaccountably guilty for the crime of not even giving an animal a name.

Then he looked over and met Harry's eyes, and the boy's gaze held his own without regret or reproach; and they were so _green_. They reminded Vernon of the vivid Christmassy moss he saw on tombstones sometimes, when he bothered to visit his father's grave in Puddleston Cemetery (he didn't like to).

He didn't even smile. The boy just looked at Vernon as if imagining whether his spine would make that noise too when it snapped in half.

Accidental magic, Dumbledore had called it. An uncontrolled burst of _magic_ that the boy could neither predict nor control.

Bullshit.

Vernon's hands tightened on the newspaper, and he fought to untighten his lips where they had started to turn white. He felt a hand on his forearm and turned to meet the pinched look on Petunia's face. Together, they forced a smile, and together, it became a little more real. And when Dudley cried and waved his rattle, his sign for wanting more food, there was nothing forced about the heartfelt curves on their faces at all.

From the chair in the corner of the living room, Harry watched them, eyes unblinking and watchful. His feet swung just above the floor in simplistic circles, like how a man might kick when hung from a noose.

__

Dudley had started to notice the odd things happening around Harry, and it was end of any and all peace that Vernon had.

Things floated around Harry; they just did. He could control it to a certain extent, but not enough to keep it from happening every half-hour or so. Something would just float by about eighteen inches off the floor or table or counter or whatever and then fall to the floor. Vernon's carpentry classes had come in handy because he had been forced to make cabinets for every single piece of dishware they had. Anything left out to dry had to be in a box, or it would be gone too. They'd already lost three dishes to the uncontrolled levitation, one of them Petunia's precious family china. She still hadn't recovered, and hadn't said goodnight to Harry in over a week since it had happened.

They had been forced to stop inviting friends over for fear that someone would see the various unexplainable _things_ that happened in their home. He wasn't surprised to lose some of his work buddies because of it; men didn't talk about things, they just acted. There was no more telling sign of distrust than for a man to bar another from his home, and whatever he said the fact remained he didn't let anyone in it anymore.

It made him look like an abusive man, and he hated that with every grain and fiber in his British soul. There was nothing worse than a man who beat his wife. He _knew _this.

Still, it was for the sake of a child, and there was nothing more precious than that, Vernon supposed. But when it started to affect Dudley, any sense of morality he had stopped making sense.

Dudley wanted things to float too. He wanted things to become hot when he touched them; he wanted owls and birds and small insects to circle him and do strange little dances in the air or on the ground like they did for Harry. But these things only happened to Harry, for Harry, and toddler Dudley watched and turned green with envy, a metaphor that brought absolutely no comfort to Vernon when he thought of it.

So Dudley howled and asked for other things instead; wanted toys and fire trucks and helicopters and Sesame Street video cassettes and the latest Rush album on from sunrise to sunset unless he was asleep, in which case he wanted silence. Until he woke up, anyway. Vernon and Petunia struggled as best they could to keep their child happy, but it was a losing fight, and the toll was evident. Vernon, sick of his worries, kept eating, and he ate more and more to distract himself as he let out the cinch on his belt and every morning he looked in the mirror and watched the fit young man he had once been disappear into the fat and flab of an overstressed middle-aged man with early grey hair.

Petunia worried her nails, and in stark contrast to Vernon (he would _hate _her if she got fat, she just _knew _it, she saw how he looked at himself in the mirror every morning) ate nothing at all. She got thinner and thinner, and only when the family doctor threatened to take her to the hospital and put her on an IV just to make sure she wouldn't die of malnutrition did she finally start to eat. She never regained that weight and never wanted to, no matter what the neighbors said. Their opinions didn't matter.

Dudley screamed again in the living room and Petunia let out a ragged sigh as she forced herself up from the couch and, step by careful step, made her way into the living room, pressing the play button on the recorder and trying to ignore the quixotic strains of Rush (she'd liked them so _much_ once) filling the room. She'd heard it far too many times to like it, now.

She desperately ignored the flat gaze of the other child in the room, sitting in the corner, surrounded by a dozen building blocks that rolled and swerved of their own accord, a chameleon ziggurat of child's toys. Once she would have watched, but that got Dudley's attention on the toys, and then he would wail for the rest of the day, unabated.

The neighbors offered their recipes and cures for colic, seemingly as caring as always, but increasingly Petunia wanted them to just go away.

__

Dudley's fourth birthday was punctuated by the discovery of Harry's ability to be some freakish kind of thermostat for everything else in the house. He spent the day wailing, only faintly aware that this was HIS special day and now it wasn't, as the other boy sat and watched, fascinated, by the ghostly snowflakes twirling overhead. No matter how Vernon tweaked the house's real thermostat, the temperature just wouldn't go over fifty-four degrees, and the frost silently creeping across the carpet near Harry and ruining the rich green color made Petunia moan as if she was dying.

Vernon glared, tired and frustrated and resentful and silent at the boy as he made some kind of cultish six-pointed snowflake between his hands and spun it in the air, until Vernon finally had enough and roared, "STOP!"

Harry jumped, a startled deer, and the snowflake disappeared. The temperature fluctuated wildly before settling maybe ten degrees higher.

"STOP THIS FREAKISHNESS!" Vernon roared, and Harry flinched away and curled up in the corner of the living room, dull green eyes peeking over a shaking shoulder at his uncle. The thermostat clicked on with a warbling sigh, and the temperature went back to some regular degree; he hoped the thing hadn't been broken by Harry's accidental magickery-whatever-whatsits.

"Don't ever do that again." the older man ordered, eyes flat and backed by four years of quiet frustration. The boy nodded. Vernon sighed and turned towards Dudley and Petunia, gathering up their presents, and leaving the room; leaving Harry shivering in a melting, once-gossamer web of crystal snowflakes and child's imagination.

The dew and sudden moisture had nearly ruined Dudley's present, but the wings of the model airplane had survived just fine, and Dudley's eyes glowed as he'd never seen them before as he wrapped his arms around Vernon's thick leg, the only part he could hug when his old man was standing upright.

"Daddy." Dudley whispered, staring up at him with wide, astonished, awe-filled eyes. "You're _awesome_."

Suddenly Vernon, who had been fighting a sense of guilt that he'd screamed at a child (a _child_, his mind whispered), chuckled awkwardly and ruffled his son's hair. But pride swelled in his heart, and a little part of him whispered, not ashamed or abashed or even afraid of being heard, that he'd done the right thing for his family.

Petunia's arms wrapped around him from behind (she had trouble doing that anymore, to Vernon's eternal shame) and she kissed him on the cheek.

"It was the right thing." she whispered quietly, as if trying to convince herself; but then Harry had been her sister's child, and undoubtedly she was a little closer to him than he was.

Vernon sighed, unconvinced, but put it aside as he smiled down at Dudley. "C'mon, kid." he said affectionately, handing a present to the child. "You've got a birthday to celebrate."

He'd talk to the boy later. They could come to a compromise over things.

They could control this. His family would be alright.

Dudley laughed with delight as he unwrapped his second present, a remote-controlled car that Vernon had picked up at the Go-Mart on his way home, and Vernon felt a little more of that real pride wedge itself deep into his heart, where it'd never come out, and Vernon never wanted it to. This was right. This was what he had wanted.

Family.

__

"You see why you can't do this, right?" Vernon tried to explain, gently rubbing his brow to ease the tensed muscles there. The boy sat in the same corner of the living room, the back one away from the fireplace, almost hidden behind the armchair. You couldn't see him back there from anywhere but the middle of the room, unless you looked carefully. It was a little drafty back there too.

The boy was incredibly resistant to listening to anything Vernon said. Well no, that wasn't true; on normal things, the boy was obedient and almost a pleasure to be around, in comparison to Dudley's bull-headed stubbornness about being taught anything he didn't want to do.

Vernon chastised himself for putting down his son and focused on the subject at hand. The boy's accidental magic.

He didn't pretend to understand, and neither did the boy, but no matter what Dumbledore said there had to be a way to restrain the kid's magic. There had to be. Petunia had potty-trained Dudley; there wasn't that much difference between bodily waste and magical waste, which was pretty much what Vernon figured was going on.

"Look." Vernon said, placating. "We'll give you a room. Whenever you feel one of those . . . bursts coming on, just go into that room and let it all out. Can you do that? You'd make me really happy. You'd make Petunia really happy too."

The boy slowly nodded, and Vernon breathed a sigh a relief, glancing up and smiling. Harry returned the smile, hesitantly.

"That's good, Harry." Vernon said, making a conscious effort to use the boy's name. "Just do that and we'll get along just fine."

He had a sneaking suspicion that Harry could only affect something if he could see it; so giving the boy a room of his own was an easy, practical solution. Up until now Dudley and Harry had shared the same room, but perhaps separation would be best. The two boys didn't seem to get along that well.

__

Amid the sound of fire extingushers, the whine of the ruby-red truck parked outside of his partially-flaming house, and the murmurs and stares of his neighbors, Vernon shrunk in on himself and struggled to find a way to explain what had happened.

Harry's safety room, the enlarged closet off the side of Dudley's bedroom, had simply exploded in mass combustion, setting the right side of the Dursleys' house aflame. Vernon had rushed upstairs and grabbed up Dudley, who was screeching wildly and scrambling away from the fire eating up the opposite side of his room. He had been forced to stop and stare at it as well; there was something wrong with the fire. It looked less like its usual feathery, flickering self, and burned lower. A low, red, seething carpet coated the floor, sparking to a brilliant white on occasion; and those sparks of white only emphasized the glutinous mass of black that the fire sprouted out of like monkey grass on the lawn.

_Needs to be mowed_, Vernon thought hysterically, but forced himself to think, actually cracking himself across the face with one enormous hand (cracking a tooth, which Vernon would only notice later on, when the adrenaline ran out of his system and his breathing started to even out. The dentist had given him very odd looks) and rushing to Dudley.

On the other side of the two rooms, ensconced in vibrating, viny flame, Harry sat and stared at the red in his hands, playing with it like some kind of particularly tough thread. He made a cat's cradle, looked up, smiled, and showed it at Vernon, a child's enthusiasm masked with the sound of crackling floor panel in the hallway outside.

"SHUT IT UP, BOY!" Vernon cried, leapt across the room (his feet burned when they landed in the fire, which would land him a permanent and minor limp for the rest of his life) and swept a fist across the boy's face, crashing into his cheek and throwing him across the closet. His head thudded into the wall and he went still and silent, slumping. The fire wavered and abruptly shrunk, transforming into more coals than actual fire.

Vernon grabbed up the boy and Dudley, ran out into the hall where Petunia was waiting, fingers shoved into her mouth and already bleeding, and together they fled the house as the coals stoked a newer, yet weaker, fire in the house.

When the fire marshall came over, a confused look on his face, and asked what had happened, Vernon laughed nervously, scratched the back of his head, and said the first thing that came to mind:

"The boy set it. He's got a closet and he started a little fire in there. Don't worry, I'll take care of it."

The marshall's face peaked and went bleak, and Vernon almost winced; but then his hand came down on Vernon's shoulder and squeezed it lightly, granting support that the Dursley man had never imagined would come.

"You're a good man, Dursley." he said, in the gravelly voice that Vernon couldn't help but imagine that all real men possessed when they had real jobs and did real work. "I wouldn't take care of the boy if he did something like that. Teach him. Make him a good man too."

Vernon nodded, almost dazed, and the fire marshall turned around and vanished into the doors of his ruby-red truck, and eventually they drove off and left their house with a new hole on the second floor and a lot of charred, blackened wood. The house still stood though, erect and proud and battle-scarred, like the veteran of any arduous war.

He felt another little wedge of pride bury itself within his heart, hard and hot and beating to the time of his blood, and he managed to get his feet under him with that piece to stand firmly on.

"It'll be alright." he whispered to Petunia, and wrapped an arm around her, trying to console her; and to his great surprise, his voice had a conviction in it that he didn't feel in his mind. "We'll fix things."

Petunia gave a watery laugh, and tilted a tear-stained face up towards him, but she was trying to smile. He was sure that hadn't been there before. "I'm glad you took those carpentry courses then." she joked feebly, and Vernon smiled and kissed her, never mind how thin she was or how fat he was or how much things had changed since they first married. She was still the plain woman that had defended him and set his pulse to racing.

He felt Dudley come in against his thigh, and his childish arms wrap around it; and Vernon's hand descended on his head, in the ancient gesture of manly acknowledgement. His son sniffed but did his best to stop crying. He couldn't do it yet, but he would in time. Vernon felt so proud he nearly burst.

Then he looked up and saw the boy, sitting in the garden and staring up at the room he had burned with a curious gaze, like he'd seen a zebra on the roof or something equally fascinating. Although he had on just some thin pajamas and a T-shirt, he wasn't shivering as Dudley and Pentunia and even Vernon himself was. He wasn't cold at all.

"Boy." Vernon said, and felt a calm surety fill him as the boy's head snapped around, eyes carrying the slightest shade of hesitance. Or fear. Or something.

It was control, of a sort, and Vernon felt like a little bit of progress had been made.

"We need to talk." he said, and the boy stared at him for a moment before curling up silently and shivering just once.

__

They had given the closet, once repaired, back to Dudley. They couldn't afford to have that happen again; quite simply, however much Vernon made, he was the only bread-winner of the family (as it should be, his warm heart encouraged at the thought), and they didn't have enough money to rebuild the west side of their house again.

Instead, he had uncovered a little closet under the stairs; almost small enough to be a cupboard, but the boy could stand up in it yet. He fire-insulated the little closet until it could survive the temperatures that the insurance investigator had estimated, somewhere around fifteen hundred degrees. The walls wouldn't last long, but with so little oxygen in the cupboard, any fire would extinguish almost instantly anyway.

The sudden image of Harry rolling on the floor, hands affixed around his throat flickered into Vernon's mind, and he recoiled as if a snake had bitten him, stumbling away from the closet. Rolling to his feet, Vernon scooted until his back met the opposite wall and stared fixedly at the tiny space, the pink-and-grey insulation hanging limply from the sides where he'd been stuffing it in with a pair of coal tongs.

It wouldn't happen, he consoled himself. He wouldn't watch his nephew die. The word for their relationship rolled off his tongue like a dead rat, and he flinched as if it was, but that didn't change the blood between them. Family was family.

The corner of Vernon's mouth quirked as he remembered why he was doing this in the first place, and he set again to plugging up the walls. Family first: that meant Petunia and Dudley. Them above all.

Cradled in the shade of his corner, at the room at the end of the hall, Harry laid on his side and stared flat-eyed down the lines of the floor, following the two-by-four pattern until they collided with Vernon's shoes and vanished.

"Boom." he whispered. On the sofa, Petunia glanced at him worriedly, but ended up just turning the volume on the telly a few notches louder. Dudley complained and she rose, walking past the child on the floor, and tried to shake off the feeling of his eyes on her back; but when she turned by Vernon and asked him how the cupboard was coming, she glanced down the hall. Harry still hadn't moved his eyes from the floor.

She shrugged it off. She had a child to feed.

__

The Dursleys worked out a reinforcement schedule for little Harry. Reducing the supernatural to numbers calmed them; freakishness was nothing more than an abnormal occurrence, and could be corrected. Like a tumor, for example.

Whenever something strange and obviously wrong happened, Harry went into the cupboard, where he would stay there the night without dinner. On days when they didn't, he was allowed to sleep in the living room on the couch, which made a rather effective bed even for Vernon.

The child psychologist had explained it in very simple terms, Vernon reflected; it was a cry for attention. The best thing they could do, then, was stay firm and let the boy realize he got attention with or without the magic freakishness. He turned the page of the Sunday newspaper contently then blinked when he noticed his teacup was three inches off the saucer and twirling gently in midair. Two poison green eyes stabbed at the china with an unblinking gaze.

The man coughed and shook his head, smiling gently. It was the cupboard tonight, then.

"You know better than to do that, Harry." he said, placing a hand on the teacup and pushing it back down to the plate. "I guess you sleep in the cupboard tonight. I'm sorry."

The boy's razor-sharp eyes focused on him for a moment.

Then he said something; some kind of edged syllable, spitting it out like overused Listerine into a cracked sink. Vernon barely had time to blink as the teacup jerked to the side, out from beneath his hand, and then crashed upwards and into his face. He felt his nose break beneath the china even as the delicate material shattered, cutting his face below the jaw and in several places over his left cheek.

He sputtered, stumbling back and out of his chair; instinctively, he poked at his cheek with his tongue, and his eyes widened in shock and pain as the muscle pushed right through the thin film of skin remaining, and his tongue emerged on the outside of his mouth.

Dudley screamed. Petunia just fainted on the spot.

Doing his best to ignore the grid of fire melting through his jaw and face, Vernon whirled around and took two long steps towards the boy, who stared up at him with chill green eyes, unafraid and dark, like an angry cat. There wasn't even a hint of apology in Harry's thin frame.

"Twit." Vernon bit out, and his hand came out and collided with Harry's face, halfway between a backhand and a punch. It felt vaguely like the jabs Vernon remembered throwing in his high school boxing ring. There was even the familiar _thud_ as the blow connected, then an unfamiliar hollow _snap_ as eighty-some pounds of force connected with the side of Harry's face and broke his jaw.

The consciousness flew from the boy's eyes, and limply he plummeted off of his chair and landed some three feet away, sprawled uselessly on the floor.

Vernon took two deep breaths, and licked at his cheek again. The metallic taste of blood in his mouth fogged his mind and the fire on his face didn't help any at all. He closed his eyes and murmured "Shaving accident," an insipid lie and what he was going to have to tell his coworkers, boss and the family doctor.

Abruptly he chuckled at the ridiculous humor of the moment.

"Dad?" Dudley inquired shakily, from behind the kitchen chair he had dived behind.

"It's all right, son." Vernon said simply, rubbed the chubby kid's hair, and went hunting for the first aid kit in the bathroom cabinet upstairs.

"What about him?" Dudley asked, pointing at the black-haired boy on the floor.

Vernon paused, as if to think about it, but there was never any question as to what he was going to say next.

"Put him in the cupboard." the man murmured, and didn't look back as he ascended the stairs, one hand over the other on the banister as if climbing a ladder. Somehow, it didn't look weak; it looked like a fireman approaching a fire, or a lion tamer circling calmly his ancient foe. Dudley couldn't stop the momentary flash of _so cool_ that flickered through his head, and he grinned, glad he had his dad.

Happy to have something he could do for that awesome dad, Dudley linked his arms under Harrry's armpits, and dragged the limp form into the cupboard, rolling it awkwardly in on its side. Then he closed the little door, and as a forethought slid the bar on the outside over, keeping him inside where he was safe.

Dudley snapped his fingers as he remembered that he'd forgotten to turn on the light so Harry could see whenever he woke up; but then he shrugged. It didn't matter because he was asleep anyway, and Harry really didn't like nightlights anyway.

__

"What are we going to tell the neighbors?" Petunia fretted, as she carefully pushed the needle through Vernon's torn cheek and looped it back around to the other side. Vernon winced, but the anesthesia dulled the sensation until it felt more like someone knocking on a log his head was leaning against.

"The truth." he replied, and when his wife gave him a horrified look he just chuckled and ruffled Dudley's hair, the little boy smiling up at him adoringly. "That Harry threw a teacup at him."

Petunia blinked, then smiled reluctantly. "I suppose that's true." she said, and laced up the lace stitch in Vernon's cheek. "All done."

Her husband rubbed gently at the spot, poked it with his tongue again (that was getting to be a bad habit of his already), and then bussed Petunia on her own cheek gently. "Thanks, deary." he said, and she beamed a little before resuming her worried demeanor.

"What about the boy?" she asked, almost bringing a hand to her mouth, but Dudley caught it and fake-glared at her. She lowered her hand, aware that it was a bad habit.

"What about him?" Vernon sighed, leaning back into his couch and looping an arm around both Petunia and Dudley. "Let me be with my family for a little bit. I'm tired with the boy."

His eyes closed, and he added, "We'll deal with him later. Together."

The Dursleys nodded resolutely.

__

_POP_

Harry bit back a shriek as he forced his jaw back into place against the hard wall of his cupboard. That had _hurt_; hurt like nothing Harry had ever felt before but the green light he saw in the depths of his dreams and the family's mirrors.

Cradling his jaw gently, he curled up in the dark of the cupboard, and, for once, didn't dream of anything but the endless black around him.

That was unusual; normally, he dreamed about snakes.

__

The cupboard opened. Squinting against the harsh light, Harry looked up at the massive form of Mr. Dursley, his broad shoulders blocking out the light. The pale strips of bandage on his rough-cut face were illuminated with a guilty glow.

"Hello, Boy." he rumbled, and Harry's attention was suddenly and inescapably caught on his knuckles, curled loosely into a fist. Each knuckle protruded outward into a bone-white peak, visible even through the flesh, the mark of a boxer.

"Hello." the Boy whispered back, his spine pressed against the far wall of the cupboard, where hopefully his **.**uncle couldn't reach.

Grave-green eyes blinked against the glare, and Vernon smiled, softly, smooth and now certain.

"We need to talk." he said, and he reached into the cupboard after the boy, and pulled him out, shirt strained tight against the weight of a man's knuckles.


End file.
